Statism Feeds the 'Culture Wars'

Theocratic Republicans have their panties in a wad about a water park in Texas that plans to host a Moslem-only event commemorating the end of Ramadan.

Their stated reasons for the outrage are revealing. Consider the below quote by Dana Loesch:

How is a taxpayer-funded, city-owned entity allowed to discriminate against non-Muslims at a public water park?

There would be literal riots if Muslims were similarly excluded and we all know that's 100% accurate.

Do note that the Daily Mail further reports, "The Muslim-only event in June is being organized and run by the East Plano Islamic Center."

In other words, this isn't some politically correct stunt devised by a bunch of left-wing staffers, as I thought it might be at first: It's a private event. Government facilities frequently host private events, and I'm pretty sure that sometimes includes events of a religious nature.

Although I am not sure about Loesch in particular, I can't think of many conservatives who would object to a public park being used by, say, a Christian group for an event it is hosting. And, assuming the event in question were, say a rental, or at least done on the same terms as any other group using the facilities, I don't see a problem in terms of discrimination or even separation of religion and state.

(Notice which of the two Loesch harps on.)

The bigger issue here -- which doesn't come up at all -- is this: What is the government doing running (or even owning) a water park in the first place? Why are countless people who will never use the park being forced to pay for it? And why is someone who supports Trump -- often (incorrectly) called "the only man standing between the United States and socialism" -- not calling out this blatant example of socialism?

Part of the answer is that Americans have become inured to things like government parks, government parcel delivery, and government schools for over a century. It wasn't long ago that conservatives were beginning to question the propriety of those things, and there still is some pushback, particularly on the matter of schools. But that strand of conservatism is on life support at best. See also: Trump's "golden shares" and his proposal to make Spirit into a government airline.

But for many (perhaps not for Loesch herself) part of the answer is surely that it isn't so much that they object to the government ramming religion down our throats, but that it's the "wrong" religion. Consider conservative support for teaching creationism as science -- or mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom -- in government schools.

If this water park were privately-owned, as it should be, the Moslem event would be no more newsworthy than any other private event, and even as things stand now, it is far less of a problem (if it is one at all) than what many conservatives are demanding in government schools.

The real outrage here is that people like Loesch pose as defenders of freedom, but fail to account for the full context of an event like this. This event is barely newsworthy as far as I can tell, but the outrage distracts from the real scandal, which is that the government is running a water park, thereby continuing to normalize socialism while also feeding the Christian nationalist outrage machine.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a sentence to indicate that the event has not yet taken place.

Modern Puritans Take Aim at Zyn

"Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." -- H.L. Mencken

***

Today, I learned of Zyn pouches, a nicotine product I'd never before heard of because, as John Stossel reports, the anti-smoking lobby wants to ban them, or at least make them harder to get.

And what is Zyn? They are little pouches people tuck into their lip to get a hit of nicotine, according to Stossel. Wikipedia elaborates further:

Unlike snus or dip, nicotine pouches do not contain tobacco or stem material, but remain addictive due to their nicotine content.

These pouches thus resemble other products -- like vaping pens, patches, and gum -- that deliver a dose of nicotine without also including the carcinogens present in tobacco.

One would think that people motivated by a concern for health would celebrate such innovations, and many surely do. It's just that perhaps such people aren't the driving force behind the prohibition of nicotine.

Opponents of selling the products focus on the addictiveness of nicotine and all but ignore the lower cancer risk and end up harming the people they claim to want to help:

Some states ban certain flavors and impose high taxes. This makes pouches about as expensive as cigarettes. That's dumb.

"It's not the nicotine that kills you. It's smoking," says Guy Bentley, director of consumer freedom at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website, in my new video.

"You shouldn't treat a nicotine pouch the way we treat cigarettes. The more expensive you make the safer product, the more the most dangerous product will be sold."

After Minnesota imposed a 95 percent tax on vaping, smokers who would have quit didn't. Thousands of them.

The rest of the piece looks at other consequences of banning products, including the creation of black markets and the crime that go with them.

Stossel is correct about this, as far as it goes, but I would have liked to see him ask, By what right does the government ban commerce, even including cigarettes? A close second would be, By what right is the government picking my pocket to pay for the consequences of someone else choosing to smoke? The bans and restrictions on cigarettes, tobacco, and nicotine started off as a wrong committed in an effort to fix problems caused by the first wrong, and have clearly morphed into a way for puritans to order people around.

Controls breed controls, and bad premises drive out good.

None of this is to say that nicotine isn't without any hazard or that children -- who don't have the full legal rights of adults, anyway -- shouldn't be barred from buying addictive substances. But adults should be free to choose what to ingest -- and held to account for any consequences.

-- CAV

Freedom Four

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. "Iran Is Not Venezuela," by Elan Journo and Ben Bayer (Orange County Register):

Eliminating the threat from Iran's Islamic totalitarian regime necessitates discrediting its ideology, making it a lost cause. Some may doubt this is possible, in the shadow of the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles, and indeed, it has been decades since America has followed the right approach. History, however, provides a compelling model.

850 words/3 minutes

2. "Ending Birthright Citizenship Won't Make America Great," by Agustina Vergara Cid (RealClear Politics):

[Cato's Alex] Nowrasteh writes that birthright citizenship "means that every descendant of immigrants has a stake in this nation and does not grow up in a legal underclass." He goes on to cite the example of Germany, where birthright citizenship didn't exist, and that created a "parallel society" prone to radicalization. When the German parliament took action to boost assimilation and grant citizenship to the children of some immigrants, the benefits were indisputable -- from the parents of the children integrating better into German society to more school enrollments and overall more integration into German society and culture.

770 words/3 minutes

3. "UK Smoking Ban Highlights Debate Over the Proper Function of Government," by Paul Hsieh (Forbes):

The law's supporters argue that the government must regulate individual lifestyles to limit medical costs that would otherwise be a burden on "society." But it is important to recognize this issue arises because of the UK's nationalized health system where taxpayers must pay for everyone else's medical expenses.

In a fully free health system (which the US does not have), private insurers could appropriately price health risks related to voluntary life choices. Smokers would pay higher premiums to cover their added health expenses, just as skydivers typically have to pay higher life insurance premiums. The added health costs of smoking would be borne by the smokers themselves.

600 words/2 minutes

4. "A Transcendent Vision for US Energy Policy," interview of Alex Epstein by Quentin Wittrock (RealClear Energy):

In general, the job of the administration, its executive branch, is to execute the law. It's not to make the law. And what we see from both parties is more and more the idea that, well, you appoint the president and they basically do -- you appoint them and they're kind of like the CEO of the company that is America. That's not the American model, and I think it's a problematic model, but I think it's the way that in many ways both parties think about it.

transcript of 45 minute interview

-- CAV

Be Sure You're Shaving a (Real) Yak

The computing term yak shaving has two different definitions:

1.Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing one to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows one to solve a larger problem.

2. A less useful activity done consciously or subconsciously to procrastinate about a larger but more useful task.

One thing that frequently falls into this category is adopting a note-taking system, such as Zettelkasten, which I repeatedly have heard about and not adopted.

Such systems can fall into either of the above categories, depending on how you're approaching them.

I do not deny that the Zettelkasten approach could be useful. I just don't see a need to use it all the time and haven't bumped into a context in which I could find it useful.

Indeed, I have employed note-taking systems of different sorts over the years, and do have a general method for tracking my projects, but I have always been of the mind that it need only make the information findable later, in case I need it. Overall, a uniform method of tracking projects and information associated with them, and an automatically-generated list of all files on my computer are it.

That said, it was encouraging to read Sasha Chapin's thought-provoking post on "Notes Against Note-Taking Systems," which advises, among other things:

Getting lost in your knowledge management system is a fantastic way to avoid creating things. Or calling that friend you're estranged from. Or doing anything else even mildly threatening. It's also a fantastic way to convince yourself that unpreparedness is what's between you and creative work. If you believe you're unprepared, know that you will never transmute into the perfectly prepared person that you think exists in the future. Unfortunately, you have to start with the person currently in this chair. That's all there ever is.

It can be a great idea to find or develop an organized method for taking and tracking notes about an important topic -- and even to expand (or redeploy) such a system later on, but messing around with this without the need to do so is a waste of time in more ways than one.

-- CAV

Great Depression Myths

John Stossel's latest column builds on an interview with economist Donald Boudreaux to challenge anticapitalist myths about the Great Depression and the Great Recession that are rearing their ugly heads yet again.

One myth that I hadn't seen debunked before was that World War II helped end the Depression:

The Depression continued for more than a decade, until, according to the Library of Congress, "Mobilizing the economy for world war finally cured the depression."

That's a myth, too, says Boudreaux.

"Unemployment fell. That's not hard to do when you conscript 2.5 million men into the military. But If you look at the actual performance of the economy, that didn't recover until the late 1940s."

It recovered, says Boudreaux, because "Republicans won the 1946 election, and they were more pro-investor, pro-business than the Democrats." And FDR died. "Harry Truman was less vigorously opposed to capitalists ... .So investors were finally confident to come back into the playing field."

That unemployment myth showed up in caricature form yesterday with Vladimir Putin's touting of sharply lower unemployment in Russia, whose economy is in the toilet. The 1.4 million fewer unemployed just happens to match losses in Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Americans have little room to laugh, though. Our schools push these myths, and policy proposals based on them are popping up again, as they always will among a poorly-educated body politic who are kept unaware of that unknown ideal, capitalism.

-- CAV

A Proposal to Protect Gig Work?

Patrice Onwuka, Director of the Center for Economic Opportunity at Independent Women's Forum, reports that there are legislative efforts underway to protect gig work, after the last few administrations played ping-pong with labor regulations defining contractor status:

The Left and the ailing labor union movement condemn independent contract work for failing to provide workplace benefits. Yet that should be a workers choice. Not everyone wants or needs benefits as a part of a work arrangement. Additionally, contractors are gaining access to employment based benefits. The good news is that proposed federal legislation and state reforms would allow companies to provide portable benefits to independent contractors without forcing them to be reclassified as employees. Policymakers on the Left should get on board. [links omitted]

My shot from the hip, not being an attorney or even having read the bill: Insofar as such a bill would create certainty for gig workers, this sounds like good news. Laws -- even imperfect ones -- aren't subject to whim like regulations and executive orders are.

The bit about employment benefits strikes me as a mixed bag. While the government has no business meddling in the medical or insurance sectors, I could see this as a legislative band-aid to make that kind of arrangement possible, further entrenchment of government meddling, or both.

On balance, I think this is a good thing, but I am curious to see further commentary.

-- CAV

The Revealing Appeal of 'Emily Hart'

A medical student in India known only as "Sam" turns out to be the catfisher behind AI-generated MAGA sweetheart "Emily Hart:"

... Before Hart went viral, he used to create scantily clad women using Gemini Nano Banana and post them on social media; however, this idea didn't take off. Therefore, he turned to AI again to take ideas from it on how he could make his influencer stand out from the crowd. At the time, the bot suggested to him that creating a "hot girl" wouldn't help him stand out from the competition.

The AI further provided him with multiple options for content creation to pick from, so he decided to create a hot girl for the "MAGA/conservative niche." This is because the AI told him that this idea would work. After all, "the conservative audience (especially older men in the US) often has higher disposable income and is more loyal."

...

..."Every Reel I posted was getting 3 million views, 5 million views, 10 million views. The algorithm loved it." He extended his income opportunities by selling subscriptions at Fanvue and MAGA-themed merchandise.

Wired elaborates further:

The influencers are created from a specific template: they tend to be white and blonde, with jobs as emergency responders. (A lot of them are cops, firefighters, or EMTs.) They also incorporate right-wing views into all of their content, railing about immigration or the Epstein files or pronouns while posing in American flag bikinis or MAGA hats -- often both.

There's nothing wrong, of course, with being white, or blonde, or being a tomboy/having an occupation favored by adrenaline junkies, or being attracted to women who meet any or all of these criteria, but my word! How predictable can you get?

My own sense of déjà vu comes from having seen exactly this archetype (scroll down) at the end of nearly every single This Week in Pictures post I've ever seen at Power Line, which, while not necessarily an outright MAGA outlet, carries enough water for Trump that I'll count it.

While I have always been baffled by the tomboy part, and -- I will admit -- it would have never crossed my mind to try to make money off of this, it is still a little bit surprising that it took AI to hatch this scheme.

That said, the following passage from Wired explains a lot:

Few of the fans cared whether Emily was real, Sam says. This is very much in line with the psychology of the average hot girl MAGA fan, according to [Brookings Institution fellow Valerie] Wirtschafter. Whether it's plausible that a sexy blonde nurse would love Christ, ICE, and flashing her boobs for strangers is secondary to the fact that many, many people want to believe it is. "Even among some digital natives, there's a perspective of, 'Well, I don't actually care if this is true. I like the sentiment of it,'" she says. [bold added]

Granted, lots of porn is pure fantasy, but anyone on the outside and looking in at Trump's cult of personality can be forgiven for wondering if this "niche" functions on that level all or most of the time. With Trump himself, after all, the difference between the bill of goods they have been sold and the real deal is, arguably, even greater.

-- CAV